I was thinking about including more African languages here on Lingq.
We have Swahili and Afrikaans, but what about Amharic, Hausa, and Somali, to give only a few examples? These languages have massive populations of L1 speakers. After all, if we can include dead and constructed languages in the Lingq portfolio, why not some more African ones?
I’m sure it wouldn’t be too difficult to find someone to help us with the necessary content to make this happen - would there be interest in these languages or others from the African continent?
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I would love to have Shona (Native to Zimbabwe and parts of southern Africa) on LingQ. There is a very big Zimbabwean diaspora around the world, so I’m sure LingQ could find people to contribute.
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I second that, ChiShona is so beautiful
I actually made Afrikaans happen, and despite, perhaps being the most well supported native African language. It’s extremely difficult to find resources that facilitates learning on LingQ. The biggest problem in my experience was two-fold. 1. Lack of online dictionaries, this is the life-blood of LingQ. Before AI translations could do it automatically it took minutes to find a translation of a word.
Now with AI this is so much easier, but question is if it’s as helpful in other languages.
2. Lack of already present language learning materials and other native language content. Just googling books in KiSwahili has been hard, one of my Motswana friends mentions that a lot of Botswanan literature is just written in English for the broader market. So that too offers a problem.
That said, I do not say this to discourage anyone, but merely to prepare them. It took a year for me to be able to add Afrikaans, and another to be able to actually learn it efficiently. It was worth it, and now I see hundreds of learners of the language who have it so much easier to learn the language than I ever did!
If you or anyone reading this is interested in adding a language on LingQ they do have a guide available. New Languages on LingQ The requirements are very easy if you find someone actually willing to put in the work. If you already have that you could be done in less than a month with readying all materials.
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We have a lot of Amharic speakers where I live who are really interested in learning English. Lingq would be of great benefit to them. Are there any possibilities of partnerships for adding basic content in Amharic to Lingq, and support for an English-Amharic dictionary?
I showed Lingq to an Amharic speaker last night who was very interested in using Lingq’s simple English content, even without having an online dictionary.
For my part, I’d like to learn just enough Amharic to order coffee and exchange a few pleasantries.
If we had the option of just a little bit of Amharic content, along with an English-Amharic dictionary, I think we might have quite a few new potential subscribers.
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You’d have to email them yourselves to ask, but, I did get a year for free on LingQ for adding Afrikaans.
LingQ prefers for you to go out and find dictionaries for the target language. It’s not too hard, you can just google then they’ll integrate them. glosbe, lexilogos, wordhippo, abyssinica, google translate. These were enough to add Afrikaans to LingQ.
So, if you could email LingQ on my earlier response: New Languages on LingQ. You could probably get it done. Hardest part for me was the grammar guide. But you don’t need to speak Amharic to get that done. You could do it on your own.
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I’d like to encourage everyone interested in learning an African language but has no specific language in mind, to try out the already existent Swahili course. Adding new languages is nice but the quality of a course depends heavily on the number of active users.
While I support the enthusiasm of people who want to learn rather small languages I’d like to point to some constraints that come with the LingQ approach and that may lead you to the conclusion that other resources might be better for your target language.
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Every new language that LingQ will add in the future will be a community project in which LingQ just offers the platform and the technical support. Everything else is up to an active community.
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The LingQ approach just works with massive input. If interesting and high quality resources do not exist, then LingQ becomes very unattractive.
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The key feature of LingQ is the integrated dictionary or translation service. Mind that poor translations and dictionary support quickly lead to frustration. In my opinion Swahili is aready a critical case and for less supported languages it doesn’t get better.
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For the beginner stage it is not that important which approach you use (some would argue about that, I know) but it becomes really critical once you come to the A2/B1 stage. Here LingQ steps in with a lot of intermediate material, and dictionary and AI support to make more difficult content comprehensible. If there is neither the wealth of content, nor the reliable support from LingQ’s key features available, then I imagine that learning a language on LingQ becomes a chore.
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I appreciate the advice, but I don’t really take this attitude.
As Steve Kaufman keeps saying, languages are windows to new peoples and cultures and it seems there are some people who want to learn an African, Amharic or otherwise.
Perhaps you wouldn’t say “don’t bother adding Lithuanian” ( there is a chat for that on this forum) and say instead “why don’t you try Czech instead, that’s a European language?”
I am actually studying Swahili on Lingq, and enjoying it, but I would like other options too.
Lingq is heavily Eurocentric in it’s language choices and if we can include Latin (a dead language) or Esperanto (a language designed non organically) then we should be able to have more African languages. There are almost 100m people in Ethiopia, and while not all of them speak Amharic as their mother tongue, it’s a Lingua Franca. Certainly more users than Latin or Esperanto.
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Sorry, I think you didn’t get my point. I did not say that people shouldn’t learn smaller languages but that it may be more convenient to study them elsewhere.
I am learning Chichewa and Náhuatl. While both have Google translate support nowadays, I’d see as above stated serious constraints for the usability on LingQ, not even mentioning the work that volunteers would need to put into translating and recording accurately all the Ministories and writing a grammar guide.
Edit: And since you mention Lithuanian. I would appreciate if a group of volunteers worked on adding it. Other than for instance Náhuatl you find a good working translator, dictionaries, and a bunch of online resources.
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I wouldn’t characterise Amharic (25 m L1 users and 58m overall users) or a language like Hausa (35m L1 users) as “small”, While I take your point there may be more resources for other, especially European, languages, I don’t think we can really write these languages off just because they’re not so well studied. Perhaps we should investigate if something is viable, before saying it can’t be done?
On the other languages you’re learning. I spent 3 years living in Malawi and spoke Chichewa/Chinyanja to a decent level (I have no idea what my skills are like now 15 years later). I would have welcomed Chichewa on Lingq to assist in an input-heavy learning method. It would have sped things up and allowed me an even deeper experience there.
I think a lot of hard work goes into starting any language on LingQ. In the end, anything worthwhile and valuable is hard to do and takes a lot of time. I don’t think we should necessarily be put off by the difficulty of something.
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Sure, Hausa and Amharic would be great. Maybe if you find some other people who are willing to learn the language you can get with the support of native speakers the Ministories and other requirements together. Good luck with that! 
btw, I tried the Google translate into open file approach once with Guaraní and it was actually not that bad, but I think you’d need like 2-3 learners and 2-3 engaged native speakers to get the project rolling. Otherwise, it’s really tiresome (and/or expensive) to do everything alone.
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